Questions tagged [clouds]
In meteorology, a cloud refers to a visible group of liquid droplets and/or frozen crystals made of water or various chemicals, suspended in the atmosphere.
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Are clouds a gas, liquid, and/or solid?
Are clouds a solid, liquid, or gas?
I have been looking online and they are often described ambiguously as a "mass". For instance, from NASA:
A cloud is a mass of water drops or ice crystals ...
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What causes these banded clouds?
A set of banded clouds can be seen in MODIS imagery during several days in January and February over the Gulf of Maine. They tend to occur with very cold winds from the NW following storms.
There are ...
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Which clouds can produce lighting and thunder?
There are several number of cloud types, but I only know that cumulonimbus clouds discharge electricity, which in turn produces thunder and lightning. Is this type of cloud (cumulonimbus) the only ...
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How to tell if fog is made out of water droplets or ice crystals?
I understand that clouds can be made out of water droplets and/or ice crystals. And that fog is nothing else than low-lying clouds.
However, I've experienced fog in a wide ranges of temperatures. I ...
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Why are the clouds white and Australia black in weather satellite infrared images?
The question Is the sunlight on the GOES-16 Imagery reaching from the east? shows a visible light image and so in the night areas the Earth appears dark and in the day areas the Earth is a bit ...
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Where can we see the noctilucent clouds?
I saw many pictures of noctilucent clouds in the UK. Is it a phenomenon only visible in the UK or we can see it somewhere else?
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Are there measurements or calculations that suggest atmospheric ice plates would be horizontal to within 0.1 degrees?
This question describes a recently released explanation for flashes of light seen at the sub-solar point above Earth from the DSCOVR satellite, which is located in a special orbit between the Earth ...
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Why are clouds darker before it rains?
What causes the darker color of the clouds (nimbus) when it is about to rain? Non-precipitating clouds (e.g., cumulus, stratus) tend to be white, but rain clouds become gray and almost black before it ...
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How can daily brightness be quantified or measured?
It occurred to me that there might very will be a metric out there that measures and quantifies "daily brightness". Meaning, how bright any given day is, taking weather conditions and cloud coverage ...
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Noctilucent clouds and anthropogenic climate change
In reading about observing noctilucent clouds, several articles about this phenomena, such as Science Daily's Spectacular 'Night-shining' Clouds Could Be A Harbinger Of Climate Change, suggest that ...
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Is there a seasonal difference in the average cloud floor?
It always looks like clouds are so much higher in the sky (altitude) in the summer than in the winter. Is that true? If not, is there some sort of optical illusion? If so, why is that?
I live in Iowa,...
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What atmospheric phenomenon am I seeing in this photo?
On a trip to Brighton, England on April 12th, 2015, I noticed this strange plume in the sky over the English Channel at about 13:00 hours. It looks like;
Something that fell out of the sky - the news ...
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"New" cloud types: Can they be used as markers for climate change observations?
This question was originally posted on Physics SE, (now deleted) but I think this community is a better fit.
This article "New" type of Clouds, reports that a revision to the International Cloud ...
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Is there a name for these "pouring" clouds?
I snapped this photo with my phone flat against the window of a bus, facing south while traveling west across a bridge in New Taipei City. I'd say it was at about 24.995N, 121.438E. It was about 14:00 ...
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What might cause these "wave clouds" near the horizon? Could it be gravity waves?
I found this image on a website - returned as a HTTP error 404 'not found'.
But the clouds look strangely repetitive. At first I thought the image had been "photoshopped", but as @gerrit pointed out ...
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Have these optical satellite ground station locations been chosen for clear skies?
Having lived in southern California, I know that some areas on the planet can be absurdly sunny and clear throughout the year, and having lived several other places, I know some areas can be ...
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Why are lenticular clouds circular?
I recently visited Japan, where I observed a lenticular cloud above Mount Fuji:
Curious by the cloud, I looked it up and found it it's a lenticular cloud, that forms because of rising moist air ...
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Why do clouds have areas of darkness instead of scattering light to produce a rainbow?
I suspect it has to do with the difference in size of a rain drop and that of the water particles in the cloud.
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Why a stratus cloud does not always reach all the way to the ground?
The surface of the ground at night cools down because of outgoing long-wave radiation. In my understanding the cooling of the surface also causes cooling of the adjacent air. If the air contains ...
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